Anthony Eden Quotes

#1. If one hasn't been through, as our people mercifully did not go through, the horrors of an occupation by a foreign power, you have no right to pronounce upon what a country does, which has been through all that.

Anthony Eden

#2. Slowly and painfully man is learning that he must do unto others what he would have them do to him.

Anthony Eden

#3. You may gain temporary appeasement by a policy of concession to violence, but you do not gain lasting peace that way.

Anthony Eden

#4. Long experience has told me that to be criticized is not always to be wrong.

Anthony Eden

#5. The more the planners, the worse the plans.

Anthony Eden

#6. Everyone is always in favour of general economy and particular expenditure.

Anthony Eden

#7. Corruption never has been compulsory.

Anthony Eden

#8. We are not at war with Egypt. We are in an armed conflict.

Anthony Eden

#9. That is a good question for you to ask, not a wise question for me to answer.

Anthony Eden

#10. Drift is the demon of democracy.

Anthony Eden

#11. Every succeeding scientific discovery makes greater nonsense of old-time conceptions of sovereignty.

Anthony Eden

#12. I am one of a rare breed of true politicians who definitely say what they may or may not mean with absolute certainty.

Anthony Eden

#13. Our quarrel is not with Egypt, still less with the Arab world. It is with Colonel Nasser. He has shown that he is not a man who can be trusted to keep an agreement. Now he has torn up all his country's promises to the Suez Canal Company and has even gone back on his own statements.

Anthony Eden

#14. There is now doubt in our minds that Nasser, whether he likes it or not, is now effectively in Russian hands, just as Mussolini was in Hitler's. It would be as ineffective to show weakness to Nasser now in order to placate him as it was to show weakness to Mussolini.

Anthony Eden

#15. The worst of being sacked is you can never find your car.

Anthony Eden

#16. We best avoid wars by taking even physical action to stop small ones.

Anthony Eden

#17. Man should be master of his environment, not its slave. That is what freedom means.

Anthony Eden

#18. No democratic world will work as it should work until we recognize that we can only enjoy any right so long as we are prepared to discharge its equivalent duty. This applies just as much to states in their dealing with one another as to individuals within the states.

Anthony Eden

#19. It is a common happening that those in power, as their tenure of office continues, find themselves less and less able to contemplate relinquishing it.

Anthony Eden

#20. All prejudices are equally fatal to good government.

Anthony Eden

#21. Nothing is more destructive of human dignity than a rule which imposes a mute and blind obedience.

Anthony Eden

#22. Although [in 1937] we might still hope to prevent the divisions of Europe into Fascist and anti-Fascist camps, our real affinities and interests, strategic as well as political, lay with France, a fact which some of my colleagues were most reluctant to realise.

Anthony Eden

#23. Anthony's father was a mad baronet and his mother a very beautiful woman. That's Anthony-half mad baronet, half beautiful woman.

Anthony Eden

#24. We cannot agree that an act of plunder which threatens the livelihood of many nations should be allowed to succeed.

Anthony Eden

#25. If you've broken the eggs, you should make the omelette.

Anthony Eden

#26. We have many times led Europe in the fight for freedom. It would be an ignoble end to our long history if we tamely accepted to perish by degrees.

Anthony Eden